We show that the disposition to focus on favorable or unfavorable outcomes of risky situations affects willingness to take risk as measured by the general risk question. We demonstrate that this disposition, which we call risk conception, is strongly associated with optimism, a stable facet of...

Arguably, for many citizens the perceived expected disutility from sanctions is smaller than the monetary gain from tax evasion. Nevertheless most people pay their taxes most of the time. In a lab experiment, we show that the willingness to pay taxes even absent enforcement is indeed pronounced....

Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratories survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We find that the willingness to buy at a higher price when higher wages are paid to the worker in a laboratory experiment framed as a market exchange...

We show that the disposition to focus on favorable or unfavorable outcomes of risky situations affects willingness to take risk as measured by the general risk question. We demonstrate that this disposition, which we call risk conception, is strongly associated with optimism, a stable facet of...

Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratories survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We investigate how fairness in a laboratory experiment framed explicitly as a market exchange relates to preferences for fair trade products before and after...

Most economic decisions are embedded in a specific social context. In many such contexts, individual choices are influenced by their observability due to underlying social norms and social image concerns. This study investigates the impact of choices being observed, compared to anonymity of...

We investigate the trade-off between the opportunity costs of decisions and their quality in a simple model. In a lab experiment, we introduce exogenous variation in the opportunity costs of time. Contrary to claims in the previous literature, we show that using more time when making small-stake...

Ambiguous prospects are ubiquitous in social and economic life, but the psychological foundations of behavior under ambiguity are still not well understood. One of the most robust empirical regularities is the strong correlation between attitudes towards ambiguity and compound risk which...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

We test whether anchoring affects people's elicited valuations for a bottle of wine in individual decision making and in markets. We anchor subjects by asking them if they are willing to sell a bottle of wine for a transparently uninformative random price. We elicit subjects'...